About two and a half years ago, I embarked on a journey of a lifetime. It was a breakthrough journey that took me from working in a cubicle at Northrop Grumman to living my dream building an internet startup. At some point, we took funding. I recruited Brian Layman and Mark Jaquith and the rest of the tech team. We moved from hosting a blog network on someone’s shared hosting provider to developing hard plans to encompass hundreds of servers in grid format.

We went from WordPress 1.5 and basic installs to over 350 installs of WordPress working in tandem with robust data sharing via APIs. We developed techniques to deploy advertising campaigns quickly and efficiently. We worked hard to build reporting tools, financial tools, management tools, and more – all in an effort to make this company work.

And it has and continues to grow at an astounding rate.

It’s been a great ride, but now it’s time to look forward and explore new territory. Recently, through my interactions with so many wonderful people in the DC technology community, the PodCamp community, the larger social media, business and technology communities, my appetite for something new and challenging has been overwhelming. I’ve had several conversations with Jeremy Wright, our CEO, over the past months exploring this stuff and he has been amazingly supportive, as has the rest of the b5media team.

An exact date has not been set, as I want to make sure a replacement is found and brought up to speed, however it will probably be within the next couple of months.

In the meantime, I’m looking forward to the next steps. At this point, I’m not sure what those next steps are but I have options. I’d like to develop Mokonji a bit more. I also have a few other venturistic ideas floating around in my head and I want to spend some time focusing more on the DC community that has sprung up around here. Obviously, I’ll continue to be blogging here at Technosailor, though in the short term, I’ll be exploring effective ways to monetize it – gotta pay for the server costs now (whew, forgot how that worked! ;-) )

I don’t know. The eager anticipation of the “what’s next” is crazy for me right now. It’s sort of like going out on a date for the first time. You don’t know what to expect but you know you really, really like the girl a lot.

Thanks for all your support for these years that I’ve been blogging. Looking forward to see what comes next! And if you want to be me (erm, the b5media Director of Technology), the company is actively looking for my replacement.